"Let's talk about that. Why all the floral imagery? That crocus just now . . ."

"From my mother's garden." Cooper put his arms behind his head and leaned back into the chartreuse leather fainting couch that manifested beneath him. He was a gay neurotic New Yorker; there wasn't a magic cetaceous shrink in the metaverse that could get the jump on him. "A purple one, my favorite kind. They come weeks before the other early spring flowers, like daffodils and redbuds. Out of a deep March or February freeze, you'll suddenly see these stumpy green shoots, followed by flowers like dwarf tulips."

"And what do you think this-"

"-My mother, stupid. It's home and nurture and nature and comfort and all the familiar s.h.i.t I have so thoroughly abandoned, or been abandoned by-however you wanna frame that complex. If you get Freudian about it-have you guys debunked Freud, out here in the voodoo-boonies?- anyway, you might pin a 'violence' signifier to the violet color, but personally I think that's a bit more than overkill. It doesn't take a vertebrate with a blowhole and a psych degree to realize I might be disturbed by the violence that's overtaken my life during the past few days, does it? Anyway, yeah: I miss my mommy. Got a pill for that?"

Tiny white teeth showed as the beluga muttered to itself. "We've got to improve your self-image, Cooper. You could be a bit more than a freeze- dried camellia, you know. Quite a bit, if you'd just decide so." He laughed, which felt funny underwater. Bubbles spiraled out of his mouth and wreathed his wrists, making him feel for some reason like a sacrificial bull. "Yeah, well, you need to ask around, because that is most definitely not the general consensus. The consensus, in general, is that I'm nothing special."

"Then why all the fuss?" The beluga looked genuinely perplexed. "What do you mean?"

"Well, you were kidnapped and brought before an Egyptian queen.

And you were stolen from her by the Undertow and tapped to perform ritual sacrifice, before you decided to take the lamb's place yourself."

"Oh, that." Cooper thought for a moment. "But she said I was nothing special, and the rest is just . . . it's just what happened to me."

"Hmm." The beluga did not sound convinced. Cooper said so. "Well, I'm just thinking about what Sesstri said about you-specifically, what was it she said about shamanism and your homeworld? I don't remember."

Cooper did. "She said 'shamans don't come from post-industrial, magicdead societies.' And then she called me a piece of s.h.i.t."

"Well, she was right, wasn't she?"

"f.u.c.k me sideways! I hope you're my spirit animal, dude, because you make a terrible shrink."

The beluga flashed an indulgent smile. "You're not a piece of s.h.i.t, Cooper, I thought that was obvious by now. But Sesstri was right when she said that real shamans don't come from post-industrial, magic-dead societies. They don't."

"Great. We have firmly established-across multiple realities and at least one dream sequence-that I am not a shaman. You, me, Sesstri, and G.o.dd.a.m.ned Cleopatra are all painfully aware that Cooper is not a shaman. He is also not a candy striper, a backhoe, an airplane, or a cupcake.

Why in the worlds-where-n.o.body-ever-dies would anyone care what kind of witch doctor I am not is beyond me, but I've pretty much stopped trying to figure it all out at this point."

"Everything dies, Cooper."

"Yeah, well you might try telling that to everybody else, SeaWorld. I'm not the one who needs convincing." His skin p.r.i.c.kled, especially his back. "Maybe you should try telling it to everybody else, if that's how you feel."

"Maybe I will." Cooper pouted and crossed his dream-arms. The beluga laughed and swished its long body in a pelagic gesture of amus.e.m.e.nt. "Don't do anything on my account. I'm just wondering- perhaps if you spoke up, people might stop poking you to see if you're something you've obviously decided you're not."

"Hey, that's not fair. I haven't decided anything."

"True statement," the beluga said, as spears of light began to play up the sides of its body.

Cooper felt tricked, though he couldn't say how. "Well, I decided to try and save the aesr. That was a decision."

"True statement," the beluga repeated in a neutral tone of voice. "Now wait a minute, those statements can't both be true. Either I decided something or I didn't. You're not very good at this, I gotta say." The beluga held up its fins. "I'm not the one wrestling this greased-up piggy, Cooper. This is your choice, not mine. Are you the decider or aren't you?"

Cooper rolled his eyes. "You are definitely the spirit animal of an American a.s.shole, I'm just not sure you're mine. We've got to get you a new job."

"Hey, look at you, making decisions left and right, captaining your own ship and so on. Soon you won't need poor old SeaWorld." The water streamers began flowing away in a manner that Cooper recognized as dismissive. He was about to be decanted into the waking world-and he knew what that meant. So did the beluga: "Might wanna pick up a prescription for painkillers though, captain. This one's a real b.i.t.c.h."

Drenched in blood, Cooper stood. The Death Boys gathered around him in a ragged semicircle went wide-eyed; Hestor's lichtail in Marvin's hand, dripping pieces of skin and fat from Cooper's back. There was something wrong with his vision-colors spun around the Death Boys, and everything looked watery. Cooper wept enough to match the weeping ruin of his back, but he didn't feel like he was crying so much as expressing a wound that had always existed, somewhere behind his face. Cooper held the image of a crocus in his mind's eye, and it was better than a stress ball or a handful of opiates-thank the beluga, he supposed, before wondering if he should thank his mommy instead. He cracked the stiffness out of his neck.

"You know what occurred to me, just now?" Cooper asked, clinging to that mental crocus. "Hestor is a stupid name."

The Death Boys looked at him in a kind of frustrated awe, exchanging glances but too unused to independent thought to apprehend him. They'd seen what Hestor had ordered Marvin to do-and they seemed appalled that Cooper could stand, let alone talk, let alone bait their leader. Colors drenched their bodies, and Cooper tried to blink it away.

"Look at my face." Cooper kept his voice even. "Am I bothered?"

Someone cursed and stepped forward-and instead of the beating Cooper expected, a scrawny Death Boy pressed a bottle of wine into his hand. Cooper sucked it like a gla.s.s teat. Marvin made a motion with his hands that might have been a call for another round of lashings or an act of protection, Cooper would never know- a Charnel Girl with a sweet face and pretty curls interrupted, pushing her way through the crowd and looking shocked to see the red blubber hanging in ropes from Hestor's lichtail.

"Um. Hestor? Your presence is requested on deck," she said.

"Daria, don't be a killjoy," one of the Death Boys said. "Nothing happens till Hestor calls down the skylords."

"f.u.c.k you, Fyde, your fun can wait. There's a skylord here with questions about the Lady."

This got their attention.

"Up!" Hestor roared. The Death Boys fled, Cooper forgotten in the blink of an eye. Only Marvin lingered, eyes full of guilt and resentment. His colors were purple and brown, bruise and s.h.i.t.

Cooper stared at the restless figure of the aesr lying in the corner. She still shuddered with his pain, and Cooper realized that she was the reason he could move and speak. She was aware of her circ.u.mstances, he could see that now, and she drank in his pain so that he could act to save them both. He wanted to go to her, to pick her up in his arms and flee this place, but he knew that wasn't an option.

Tttthank youuu, he thought, still struggling with sending rather than receiving. Iiiif youuu hear aaand can fleeee . . .

She gave no answer, aloud or in his head. Cooper's mind raced: what could he possibly do, and how could he possibly do it?

Cooper would not squander the aesr's anesthetic gift, but he didn't know how best to use it. So he stalled, waving the wine bottle in Marvin's face. "Listen, I'd love to meet Mumm-Ra the Everliving and plan our next big dance number, but I have some shaman stuff to do. Can this wait?" He took another swig, drinking deep.

"It really can't." Marvin sounded so bitter, for the one who'd done the flensing. "When a skylord calls, you answer."

"M'kay." He held out his arms, stained with blood from his back. "Gotta bandage?" Inside, Cooper scratched at the walls of his skull. He knew he needed to clear his thoughts in order to accomplish anything, but they were a tempest.

Then Marvin punched him in the nose, and Cooper dropped to his knees. Half- aware, his mind reeled. He felt himself slip halfway out of his body-not quite the same thing as his visit to the Cicatrix, but close enough. While part of him watched Marvin reach down with an ugly expression to haul him back to his feet, another part of Cooper flew elsewhere. In a fraction of a heartbeat, Cooper was singing to the worlds as he slipped between their shimmering curvatures. There was no s.p.a.ce in that nirvana, but plenty of math. In the instant it took for Marvin to pull Cooper's body up, Cooper's spirit called out for the one who had no voice. He shouted down her soul.

"What the f.u.c.k are you?" Marvin dug his fingers into Cooper's arm, severing whatever strange fugue state Cooper had managed to achieve. The bliss of timelessness fell away, the moment unfroze, and he was Cooper again. Wounded and lost and full of fury.

"You tell me." He shrugged. "What are you, Marvin? And do you like it, whatever it may be?"

As Cooper watched, Marvin's colors resolved into a purplish sign that hovered over the skin on the side of his neck: a tattoo swallow snipping the line of an anchor with its beak. The sign shimmered in the air and pulsed with Marvin's heartbeat, and Cooper knew he was the only one who could see it.

"Marvin, listen," Cooper pleaded in a final bid to reach Marvin's diluted humanity. "You've got this bird on your neck now, and I think-"

"Not now, f.u.c.khead. I didn't go through all of this to have you disappear when the f.u.c.king CEO shows up." Marvin pulled him through the door and Cooper was swept along with the rest of the hurried bodies. "Get your fat a.s.s upstairs and shut the f.u.c.k up until somebody important tells you to talk."

All the other prisoners called out as they left, even the eyeless nun with the wimple bolted to her skull. The aesr remained still, but Cooper could feel the pain and rage and fear that boiled inside her luminescent skin as he left her to her fate.

The rooftop seethed with chaos, and Cooper saw something that made him almost cry out in relief: a pair of Charnel Girls held Sesstri down, while four more were straddling Asher. Cooper's heart rose in his chest. His friends had come. He didn't know how they'd found him, but even captured, Asher and Sesstri changed the possible outcomes and improved his odds of surviving.

But something was wrong with Asher-he thrashed against their bodies, driven to fits by something. Something that matched the drumbeat of blood and numbed agony that had been Cooper's back. "It's her! It's her!" he screamed, over and over, writhing. A Death Boy joined the four Charnel Girls holding Asher down, kneeling on his neck with a wicked smile.

Can Asher feel it too? The thought disturbed him, and he redoubled his effort to maintain the crocus in his mind's eye; it kept him sane, even if the aesr siphoned away the pain from his back.

"We've had no word from La Jocondette." Killilly marched over to Hestor, who stood alone, whispering to himself. "The Lady has vanished."

"No, that's not right." Hestor shook his head, casting a quick glance over his shoulder to a corner of rooftop where the darkness gathered, dripping down from the sky. "She leads the attack at dawn. She's our general."

"We'll soon see." The Charnel Girl captain seemed eager. She had one arm around a disfigured white-blond woman, who kept putting her fingers over the place where her lower lip should have been.

"Offer up the false shaman," Marvin suggested, jerking his head in Cooper's direction.

Killilly frowned. "What for?"

Marvin shrugged. "Maybe he's an adept, maybe he's a fool-either way, he's a distraction, and if the Lady really is gone . . ."

Hestor nodded. "You know what kind of option failure is, Lil, and it's no option at all."

"Your failure, not mine." She spat at Hestor's feet, then turned on Marvin. "You f.u.c.ked him for this? For a distraction? I don't understand you boys. Sandiz lost a lip to his pink-haired friend." She jabbed a finger toward Sesstri, who snarled and snapped her teeth at the two who held her down.

"I f.u.c.ked him because I wanted to," Marvin hissed, a viper defending itself against several opponents at once. "And because he was with the Lady. It's not my fault if Sandiz can't keep her ugly face in one piece."

"Brilliant." Killilly looked exultant and terrified and capable of anything. "Just f.u.c.king brilliant." Her colors became a yellow-orange chain around her ankles, intertwined with marigolds.

Rough hands shoved Cooper forward and he stood alone in a patch of dark rain. Ice ran up his spine as he felt-more than saw-a shadow plunge from the sky. It dropped with the speed of a warhead and Cooper flinched, but its landing made no impact. The shadow resolved into a huddle of rags just inches from his feet. The black ma.s.s shuddered and Cooper took a step backward.

Before him rose the lich-lord, cloaked in dark wools and crowned in pale fire that radiated the opposite of heat. Cooper saw sc.r.a.ps of withered, parchment-dry skin plastered to a skull the color of iron, missing its jawbone. But its eyes! The lights where its eyes should be sparked with electricity, questing and hungry. It stood on skeletal toes that did not touch the ground, suspended above the rooftop as if wearing invisible heels. Jewelry pasted to its fleshless face glittered gold beneath a snowy wig, a coiffed asymmetric bob that the lich adjusted with one hand, preening. Looking at it, Cooper understood that it had no s.e.x, and that if the undead thing appeared masculine or feminine, then it wore gender merely as an accoutrement.

"Lord!" cried Killilly with what felt like false enthusiasm. "You arrive earlier than antic.i.p.ated, and so our bliss at your presence is all the sweeter for its unexpectedness!"

"Aesssr," it hissed from its jawless iron skull, but Cooper could not tell if the word was a demand, a question, or an announcement. "I felt my aesssr cry out in pain disssproportionate to your little inductions. Ssso I desssided to sssurprise you, darlings. Perhaps you have thrown a tantrum and abused my aesssr because you managed to lose the Lady, yesss?"

Appearing at Cooper's side, Marvin pushed him to his knees with hands on Cooper's shredded shoulders, and he folded like a doll, intimidated by the figure that loomed before him and emanated the strangest aura: charismatic putrescence, black on black on black, but limned in gold. A thrice-black wind blew the petals off of the crocus in his mind, and Cooper found himself caught in a web as- again-his thoughts became not his own. I should be thinner, he decided, aware of the absurdity of the desire even as he was helpless to resist it. The lich poured a blackness inside him, filling up his mind with need for fleshless fingers entwined around his hair, his master's blade like ice against his pulsing neck. Gold and black and forever.

They will destroy me, Cooper knew, watching Hestor approach. They will send me somewhere small and dark and I will scream there until my voice is paper and my bones turn to rust. To his right, the rain poured sheer and straight past the lip of the roof to the ground, so far below. It might as well be bottomless.

"Perhapsss you can explain to usss why your ssscheme failed, Hessstor?" lisped the lich-lord in a dry voice.

"Lord?" Hestor showed the first hint of doubt about the Lady and her fate. He had colors, but Cooper couldn't make out the shape.

"She is with usss no longer, Hessstor. She is gone, forever. We were a.s.ssssured that thisss was impossssible-our agreement with our Unseelie allies, in fact, was predicated upon thisss fact. Can you tell usss why the Lady isss Dead?" Was the lich-lord smoking a cigarette? It was, a brown cigarette smoldering in a black holder. It waved the opera-length Bakelite like a wand. "And can you tell usss how?"

Hestor shook his head in denial. "That's impossible, Lord! She cannot Die, she is the mother of life without Death, who will found your dynasty of freedom!"

"Neverthelessss"-the lich shrugged its padded shoulders and lifted its gloved hand in a gesture of feigned helplessness that reminded Cooper of nothing so much as a fashion model draped in black cashmere- "Dead she remainsss." It waved Hestor away like a caloric canape.

"But this whole thing was her . . . it was her idea!" Hestor didn't understand. Tonight was his triumph, and he was covered in Cooper's blood to prove it.

The lich made a noise of disappointment that sounded like a hundred beetles clacking their mandibles. "Do you really believe that, Hessstor? Do you really?"

"Believe what, Lord?"

Oh G.o.d, Cooper realized with a feeling that was indistinguishable from despair or exultation, Hestor has no clue what's really going on, does he?

The lich flicked its electric eyes toward Cooper and gave the ghost of a nod. "Your chattel understands more than you do, my proud sssubordinate." It laughed, like parchment shredding. "You missstake a p.a.w.n for the queen."

Lolly's mother. If Thyu had ordered him kidnapped and brought to the Lady for a.n.a.lysis, then whoever had summoned the Undertow to La Jocondette had been clever, brave, and well- informed enough to betray her. From his time inside the Cicatrix, she seemed the most likely party to successfully outmaneuver Lallowe Thyu. The lich nodded again, and Cooper found himself almost incontinent at the prospect of this dried, molted thing deferring to him when it should by all rights have been devouring him instead. The last petal flew off the flower in his head.

"I don't understand," Hestor said, almost whining, scrambling for some foothold of understanding. "The Lady will be our queen, Lord. She is the instrument of our victory."

"Oh dear." The lich wedged its long cigarette holder in the s.p.a.ce of a missing tooth and removed the glove covering one of its hands, tugging off each finger of the soft leather, one at a time. Beneath lay bones like rusted metal ore. "I thought I heard you contradict me."

Hestor's eyes grew wide as saucers, and Cooper heard the inarticulate wail of fear from inside his head. The lich smiled with its eyeless eyes. "Sssurely I was missstaken?"

"But, but-" Hestor whined like a spoiled child, and the lich-lord reached out with a limp wrist and backhanded the Death Boy chieftain off the rooftop. Hestor flipped once in midair, his feline reflexes and bristle of tawny hair giving the impression of an abused alley cat-his eyes locked onto Cooper's for half a second, and then he was gone, trailing a scream.

"Heheh." The lich rasped out a papery giggle, then coughed up something wet and charcoal- gray that sizzled as it landed on the rain- slick roof. "Maybe Hessstor will find more sssuccesss in his next life. Marvin, do we sssuffer incompetenssse?"

Marvin stepped forward with an almost military, regimented posture. "No Lord, never."

"Lady," the lich-lord said. The word was both a command and a question.

"I-I don't know, Lord. I was the last to see her, wasn't I, Cooper? She was fine when I left her, wasn't she, Cooper?"

"Really, Marvin?" The ease with which the lich had unemployed Hestor stirred Cooper from his stupor. "Are you really stupid enough to ask me to confirm your f.u.c.king story?"

Marvin said nothing, his fists balled and his jaw tight.

Cooper turned to the lich, less afraid of it now. "To be honest, Miss or Mister Lich, I don't remember any lady at La Jocondette," Cooper said, and almost smiled. "But I've spent enough time with Marvin to know how much he likes to lie."

"I sssee." The lich tutted cigarette smoke and made to leave, looking toward the ever-churning vortex above. It sounded merely disappointed, and seemed to Cooper to have expected nothing more from its living followers.

Something shifted below-Cooper sensed the change. There was a woman made of bruised light who felt herself . . . return. As if a piece of her that had been hiding suddenly returned, slid into place and ignited. Meanwhile the Undertow cowered before their G.o.d. Cooper held his breath, and didn't dare to hope.

"Lord?" Marvin begged. The lich inclined its head a single degree. "Thank you, Master. Your freedom is my freedom, Master. Forgive me."

"Oh good," shrugged the lich, drawing its wool wrap close about its overpadded skeletal shoulders and rising a few feet into the air. "Yesss, yesss-freedom. Whatever. Do as you please with them, Marvin. You've earned it, haven't you? Yesss, earned it with your warm body." The lich swept its bare hand to indicate the cowering Undertow. It rasped a noise that resembled a chuckle. "They are yours for as long as you can keep them."

Suddenly a staccato burst of exploding gla.s.s ripped through the night as something blew out all the windows on the floor of the harem beneath them. The building shook, its embedded circuitry strobing light in frenzied bursts, and the roof was thrown into a chaos of pure golden light. Cooper heard a cry that sounded something like a bird and an insect making whalesong together, but so loud it nearly concussed his skull- then, through tears, he saw a smear of light rocket into the air at enormous speed, hurtling away from the tower in an arc of sun-bright wings and a buzzing, keening wail.

RunFlyScreamExplode! ExplodeScreamFly, RunCooperRun! EscapeEscapeEscape!

Cooper caught his breath-it was her, the aesr. It had worked. Somehow, against any logic he recognized and yet making a perfect kind of sense, his gambit had worked: she had freed herself. Cooper laughed out loud, drawing baleful glances from the agitated Death Boys and Charnel Girls, especially Marvin-who had seamlessly a.s.sumed Hestor's hauteur. It did him little good, though-the Undertow were in chaos.

The lich remained an intractably still figure, hovering on the tips of its toes while its minions surged around it. Cooper watched it following the bright path of the freed aesr with its eye- sparks: she flew straight as an arrow toward the Dome. From the lich, Cooper sensed a colossal ambivalence that dwarfed them all, and also a seething, shocked despair.

Then a screech from the far corner of the roof cut through the confusion, and Marvin whipped his head around in annoyance. The lich remained implacable while a streak of gray fury hurtled across the rooftop. Asher had escaped his captors and his face was twisted like a granite gargoyle.

"You sick f.u.c.k!" Asher cried, his eyes skewering the lich.

Cooper cheered. The lich wafted behind Marvin.